Chapter 196 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

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The small pattern continued to do its thing. Sometimes it won, sometimes it didn’t, but it was now so widespread that I didn’t think anything could stop it. Its victory was assured; the only question was how long it would take to take over the whole playroom.

It would be nice if it was fast about it because it took quite a lot of concentration to make sure that no creatures were born on that floor. With so many monsters, it actually took a decent chunk of my mana regeneration, and I kinda wanted it back as I had long-term projects that required resources.

It took a bit, but the 40th floor was done, and the ants were discovering the new openings. Normally I would declare a new age for them, but I didn’t want to call it another colonization age. If I called it something that it will be, the meeting of two different ant civilizations, I’m afraid they would figure things out as they are too clever. There are also times when I must accept that a civilization has grown old enough that they don't need my help to name their ages.

It was the end of an era, and I looked back at all that I had achieved. How had I gotten this far, from just a single room with two ant colonies living in the same space, sometimes fighting, to a place where civilizations arise in worlds larger than the real one outside of me? And I wasn’t even halfway done with my journey, as I still had ten floors until I reached 50. This has all been so fun; I kinda don’t want it to ever end.

But I can't just stop advancing—that would be arguably even worse. So, as the two ant civilizations moved slowly and cautiously downwards to discover their new world, it was time for another breakthrough.

It went by quite fast, but once again, I became stronger with another one of my skills, this time Pattern Strengthening rank B+ getting to rank A+. I was slowly getting all of my basic skills to high rank, which was good news.

As I started to expand the 41st floor, I already knew what I was going to make the playroom into. It was going to be my first low-gravity floor, as I wanted to use the new vertical space I had access to.

Going from three kilometers to 14 was a huge jump in vertical space, and I hadn’t actually done a floor that properly gave the environmental advantage to fliers. To make this even more advantageous to them, a lot of the sky would be filled with floating islands. This dungeon rule was going to take a bit of upkeep, but the playroom itself should soon start to produce a positive amount.

Time continued to march forward as I worked on all of my different projects and continued to make and maintain my dungeon. I needed to put more and more effort into my dungeon rooms, as the number of adventurers was growing every day—and by a lot. I even had more and more underwater adventurers coming. Fortunately, a lot of the new adventurers entering were already gold rank, so I didn’t have to worry too much about my upper floors.

Things have especially picked up since the 35th floor, but I think that’s because adventurers have called that floor the beginning of a new rank: Black gold. It seems that in the wider world, black gold is a rank that’s starting to limit adventurers not by how strong or how brave they are, but by logistics.

The number of dungeons that are black gold drops off quite significantly from gold. Because of that, there are a lot of adventurers who want to delve that deep, which makes dungeons and floors like that a limited resource. Even worse, almost all other dungeons only have a few monsters per floor of that rank; otherwise, they make up the difference with numbers of lower-ranked monsters.

That isn’t that good for ranking up, although the difficulty still remains correct. While I also have similar rooms, most of my rooms feature monsters of the proper rank for that floor. That means that currently, the floors that are black gold basically have more monsters of the required rank to continue growing stronger than almost all the dungeons in the world combined. I was incredibly proud of that fact.

It took a bit of time, but eventually, I finished expanding the 41st floor, ending up with a floor size of a bit over 71,000 kilometers in length basically 60,000 kilometers in width and 14,100 meters in height. I decided to continue increasing the height by 100 meters each time. It just felt right and would mean that I was always making myself bigger by every metric, even if it was just a small amount.

The room itself was going to have a pretty normal biome spread, with the huge difference being that there was going to be a lot of landmass up in the sky—I'm thinking five times more than on the ground level.

That would also make lighting incredibly interesting because there would be a lot less sunlight at the bottom. I was just itching to find out what interesting creatures would come from that kind of environment.

During this time, the small pattern finally conquered the entire continent it began on. It would have had a really hard time expanding further, as the oceans around it would have slowed it down quite a bit, and it seems like water didn’t really mix well with it, as none of the underwater monsters were affected—at least not yet.

The miasma that was created by the plants becoming undead did seem to have an effect on the water, but only time will tell what will happen. The small pattern is lucky that some of its undead are quite intelligent, and with intelligence comes the ability to figure out problems, like crossing an ocean.

In the 40th-floor playroom, ants were busy expanding. There were now thousands of colonies, as millions upon millions of ants decided to go and colonize this new world. It took until now for scout ants who were exploring their new surroundings to run into each other far away from their colonies. While there were battles between new colonies, it was not something that happened immediately after first contact.

So after a bit of a stare-down, they moved closer to each other to greet each other. The ants had a lot of languages, but the scouts were the ones who were thought to recognize and speak the most common languages. When they started to communicate, both of them were confused.

They understood each other a bit, but not really. When I made the United Ants floor, I gave them the knowledge and language that was a bit older than the current one, and of course, over time, their own society also changed it a bit.

The tension ramped up, and soon both of the ants realized that something was terribly wrong. Both of them almost immediately started to back off, and when they were far enough away from each other, they started to run at top speed back towards their colonies.

It was fortunate that the ancient ants weren’t the ones to make first contact. With the modifications I did, they were a lot less aggressive, but that didn’t mean they weren’t aggressive. This was going to be interesting.